Science

Because many readers have been saying I was wrong in thinking that Bill Maher was jesting when he did a recent “New Rules” piece on UFOs, in which he seemed to be joshing when he said that he’d changed his mind and now believes in them, I queried the pretty reliable AI bot Grok to find out. My question is in bold below, and Grok’s answer is indented.  The good thing about Grok is that it gives links (see sources below) so you can check their claims.

 

Does Bill Maher believe in extraterrestrial beings visiting Earth in UFOs?

Thought for 20seconds

Yes, Bill Maher currently believes that extraterrestrial beings (or non-human intelligence) are visiting or observing Earth via UFOs/UAPs (unidentified aerial phenomena).

foxnews.com

In a “New Rule” monologue on the March 27/28, 2026 episode of Real Time with Bill Maher (titled “The Disclosure Moment”), he stated:

“Given the increasing number in recent years of sightings by serious military personnel of unknown aircraft operating outside our apparent abilities, if at this point you don’t believe aliens are here and observing us, maybe you’re the conspiracy theorist. … They’re here, they came in a sphere, get used to it.”

youtube.com

He added that his view has evolved: “My opinion changes when the information changes.” Maher contrasted this with older abduction stories (which he dismissed as anecdotal from “rural people”), noting that current reports come from credible military pilots, intelligence officials, and bipartisan figures describing objects that defy known physics—accelerating instantly, moving between air and water seamlessly, and “playing peek-a-boo” with the military.

foxnews.com

This stance appears consistently in his recent appearances. For example:

• On his Club Random podcast with filmmaker Dan Farah (director of the UFO documentary Age of Disclosure, which Maher has promoted), he discussed government cover-ups of crashed UAPs, recovered non-human bodies, reverse-engineering efforts, and why disclosure could spark a global tech race. youtube.com
• He has raised the topic multiple times on Real Time in the past several months, treating recent UAP reports from “serious people” (military, politicians, officials with security clearances) as compelling evidence rather than fringe claims. realclearscience.com

Critics (including some skeptics and science writers) have called this a shift to “full-blown believer” territory and questioned the evidence, but the question is about Maher’s own position—not whether it’s correct. He has long been a vocal skeptic of pseudoscience and religion, so this represents a notable change driven by what he sees as accumulating high-credibility reports.

realclearscience.com

In short, as of early 2026, Maher explicitly accepts that extraterrestrial visitors are here and actively interacting with (or at least observing) us through these phenomena. He even jokes directly to the aliens in his monologue, asking them not to wipe us out while pleading for help with nuclear weapons and fossil fuels.

So, I may well have been wrong when I said Maher couldn’t possibly accept the existing “evidence” for aliens and UFOs.  He actually appears to. I’d like to see somebody ask him the question straight out, and insist that Maher give a straight answer. If he said he was a believer, I have to say that my respect for him would plummet, for I see the evidence as thin. And where would those aliens have come from? Why hasn’t the nosey news media managed to sniff out the most important story in the history of humanity?

I don’t have any problem admitting I was wrong—I just want Maher to give a straight answer to a straight question. The Grok-ish answer above is, in my view, not dispositive.

All eyes are on the inner solar system in April 2026, as two comets reach perihelion. One, Comet R3 Pan-STARRS we’ve known about since last year. Another, sungrazer A1 MAPS was just found as the first comet of 2026 and presents us with a big question: will it survive its blistering perihelion passage on Saturday, April 4th, or simply vaporize like the majority of sungrazers before it?

The muon collider was once dismissed as impossible, but is now gaining steam as the successor to the Large Hadron Collider. If built, it could offer a new window to reality 

It’s hopeless: Nature, like nearly all prominent science journals, has been colonized by woke craziness.  Perhaps the word “craziness” for the present topic is a bit too strong, but the headline below suggests a degree of unhinged-ness that often comes with virtue-flaunting. And of course this isn’t the first such article in Nature.

Click the screenshot to below read the article, part of a series billed as “profiles [of] scientists with unusual career histories or outside interests”. This scientist, Dr. Anne Poelina, has the unusual habit of naming a river as the first author of her science papers:

An excerpt;

Conservationist Anne Poelina has a deep connection to the fresh water that runs through the dry red-rock landscape of the Kimberley region in Western Australia. Poelina identifies as a Nyikina Warrwa woman, and her people are the Traditional Custodians of the Martuwarra Fitzroy River. The river meanders through the region’s arid land, cutting a path of about 735 kilometres long through steep gorges, savannahs and flood plains before terminating at King Sound, a delta fringed by tidal mangroves by the Indian Ocean.

The Martuwarra Fitzroy River is one of Australia’s last-remaining relatively intact, undammed tropical river systems. For now.

The river faces many threats, for instance, from water use in agricultural irrigation. It’s also at risk from proposed plans to extract natural gas through fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, and to look for rare-earth elements and metals such as vanadium and titanium. Moreover, climate change is predicted to cause extreme floods and droughts.

. . .Poelina is connected to the river through her matrilineal heritage — her mother’s people are the Nyikina First Nation. The Nyikina’s traditional territory, or Country, lies in the river’s watershed, as do those of nine other Indigenous communities. (Country is the term that Aboriginal Australian people use to refer to their ancestral lands, its meaning is similar to the Western concept of nature.)

Poelina explains that “in terms of property rights, the river owns me. So, I have a duty of care and the fiduciary duty to protect this river’s right to life.” Because Poelina works with the river to produce fresh knowledge and assimilate ancient wisdom, she decided to recognize its contributions formally. In 2020, she started including the Martuwarra River of Life as the first author on her publications.

Poelina says, “Country is a first author for Indigenous people in the Northern Territory of Australia. So, I just did it.” Whether the journal to which she submitted her first paper assumed “that the name was human or not, I don’t know”, she adds.

Here’s a list of her papers on Google Scholar, and, sure enough, a few of them—but far from all—have “MRiverofLife” as first author, with “M” standing for “Martuwarra”. Here’s one (click to go to site):

Here’s a description of the river in northwest Australia (it’s called either “Martuwarra” or “Fitzroy”), and here’s a description of its place in local culture, where the river is called a “living ancestral being.”  It’s neither living nor an ancestral being: that is just lore. Still, the indigenous council of “river keepers” consults with the Australian government to keep the river in good shape, and that’s an admirable thing, But making a river a coauthor? Perhaps I should have made my Drosophila flies the first author of my papers, maybe disguised as “Dr. O. Sophila.”

At any rate, reader and professor Jente Ottenburghs (an evolutionary biologist who works on birds) couldn’t take it the Nature paper, and wrote me this: “This seems to be another case where a high-profile journal romanticizes indigenous knowledge (similar to the situations in New Zealand and Canada that you covered recently). I also decided to write a blog post about it, partly inspired by the book The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch which I am currently reading.”

Sure enough, his blog post is below, and you can access it for free by clicking the screenshot:

Two excerpts. First, on the ubiquity and sacralization of the “two-eyed seeing” trope and the sacralization of the oppressed (i.e., indigenous people). Note that yes, Australian indigenous people were badly treated by European colonists, but that is not what’s under consideration here.

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in incorporating indigenous knowledge into scientific research. There are indeed nice examples where such knowledge has proven valuable. For instance, a recent study in Oryx combined ethnospecies lists from local communities with scientific datasets to reveal a consistent decline in bird body mass across three continents. Approaches like this study demonstrate that local knowledge can complement scientific inquiry, particularly in data collection and long-term ecological observation.

However, indigenous knowledge is often romanticized, sometimes being portrayed as inherently superior to scientific knowledge. This tendency is partly driven by a legitimate desire to correct historical injustices (such as colonialism and the marginalization of local communities) and to show greater respect for indigenous perspectives. While this shift is clearly necessary and overdue, it should not come at the expense of critical evaluation of indigenous knowledge.

Many elements of indigenous knowledge consist of local myths or context-bound explanations. As such, they are often parochial rather than universal, and therefore do not qualify as good scientific explanations. This does not diminish their cultural, historical, or philosophical value, but it does mean they should not automatically be treated as reliable sources of scientific insight.

Of authorship and the river:

There appears to be growing pressure within academia to signal the recognition of indigenous knowledge, sometimes in ways that blur the distinction between cultural respect and scientific rigor. A striking example appeared in Nature, where conservationist Anne Poelina listed the Martuwarra River of Life as a co-author on her publications.

Poelina explains that “in terms of property rights, the river owns me. So, I have a duty of care and the fiduciary duty to protect this river’s right to life.” Because Poelina works with the river to produce fresh knowledge and assimilate ancient wisdom, she decided to recognize its contributions formally. In 2020, she started including the Martuwarra River of Life as the first author on her publications.

When asked why the river should be listed as first author, she responded: “Because it’s the authority. It’s where I get my authority.” This reasoning stands in direct contrast with the scientific method, which explicitly rejects appeals to authority as a basis for truth. Science operates as a culture of criticism, where ideas must withstand scrutiny regardless of their source. As physicist Richard Feynman famously put it: “If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It doesn’t make any difference how beautiful your guess is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is … If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong. That’s all there is to it.”

Hence, attributing authorship to a river on the grounds of authority is not just unconventional; it reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of how knowledge is evaluated in science.

. . .A similar issue arises in arguments that emphasize the age of indigenous knowledge (or any other knowledge system). Poelina suggests that “if we have the oldest systems of thinking around science and law, shouldn’t the world be listening to what our people have to say?”. But age is not a marker of reliability. As discussed earlier, Greek myths are thousands of years old, but they obviously fail as scientific explanations because they are easily varied and lack universality.

The same principle applies more broadly: all knowledge claims (whether scientific or indigenous) must be evaluated using the same standards. Some elements of indigenous knowledge may indeed prove robust and valuable under scrutiny, while other elements may not. We still need to separate the trustworthy wheat from the superstitious chaff. And the scientific method is the best approach to do just that.

There’s a preliminary section of Ottenburghs’ paper, inspired by his reading of Deutsch, about how science works and how scientific explanations are evaluated, which fed into the post (or riposte) above.  This whole thing may seem trivial, but if we don’t keep calling out the creeping sacralization of indigenous knowledge, and the intrusion into science of myth, storytelling, and superstition, it will become stuck in science like a tick on your leg, with the potential to cause the scientific equivalent of Lyme disease.

The immune system going rogue and attacking healthy tissue seems to behind some cases of long covid, a discovery that could open doors towards treatments

Improved hardware can send ten times as much data through existing fibre optic cables, potentially providing a way to massively upgrade the internet's infrastructure without the cost and inconvenience of laying any new cables

I think the site below was suggested to me by Facebook, but at any rate one can subscribe for free. It’s called 1000 Libraries Magazine, and it specializes in news about books, which of course interests me.  Here, for example, is one of their latest articles whose title was catnip for me (click to read; you may have to give them your email and subscribe):

Now of course everybody knows at least one of these: the Bible. But can you guess the others? Some are obvious when you think about it, but others are not. I’ll list the top ten giving the number of copies estimated to have been sold. Text from the site is indented. I’ll also tell you if I’ve read them (total read: 8/10).

1.)  The Bible. 5 billion copies sold. 

Sitting firmly at the top, and likely forever unchallenged, is The Bible. With an estimated 5 billion copies sold, it’s the most distributed and translated book in human history.

What makes this even more remarkable is how it spread. Long before modern publishing, social media, or mass literacy. The Bible has been translated into over 3,000 languages, carried across continents by missionaries, scholars, and believers, and printed continuously for centuries.

I read this when I was writing Faith Versus Fact. It was a tedious exercise, and assertions that it’s a great work of literature are bogus. Parts of it are good, yes, but I always say that if there was only one copy of the book, sitting in a dusty “reduced price” bin somewhere, critics would claim it is boring—which it is.  Try reading how the Ark was constructed near the beginning!  It is considered a great work of literature only because it was influential, not because it was good. However, the King James translators did do a good job on the translation.

2.) The Little Red Book. 1.1 billion copies sold. 

This one surprises many people. Officially titled Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong, The Little Red Book reached 1.1 billion copies sold, largely during China’s Cultural Revolution.

It wasn’t sold in the traditional sense. It was distributed, required reading, and a political tool. At one point, owning a copy wasn’t optional; it was a social expectation.

I haven’t read it.

3.) The Qur’an.  800 million copies sold. 

As the central religious text of Islam, the Quran has sold an estimated 800 million copies worldwide.

Muslims believe it to be the literal word of God, revealed in Arabic, which is why translations are often considered interpretations rather than replacements. Like the Bible, it’s recited, memorized, studied, and revered, not just read once and shelved.

Yes, I read it, also when writing Faith Versus Fact. It’s not only boring like the Bible, but filled with more animosity, bellicosity, and hatred than you can imagine. I was surprised that so few copies were sold: there are nearly as many Muslims as there are Christians on the planet, but their sacred book has sold less than 20% as much as the Bible.

4.) The Bhagavad Gita. 503 million copies sold. 

Part philosophy, part spiritual guide, part epic dialogue, The Bhagavad Gita has sold over 503 million copies.

Embedded within the Indian epic Mahabharata, this relatively short text explores duty, morality, devotion, and the nature of life itself. It has inspired thinkers from Mahatma Gandhi to modern self-help writers.

Yes, I read this, but simply because it was touted as a work of philosophy and because it had a big influence on India, a country I love. I thought it was definitely worth reading. I have not read the entire Mahabarata.

Robert Oppenheimer certainly read at least the Bhagavad Gita (and in the original Sanskrit!), for he gave a famous quote from it when the atomic bomb was successfully tested in New Mexico. Here’s what he said to NBC in 1965:

“I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita; Vishnu [a principal Hindu deity] is trying to persuade the prince that he should do his duty, and to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, “Now I have become death, the destroyer of the worlds’. I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.”

5.) Don Quixote. 5oo million copies sold.

Often called the first modern novel, Don Quixote has galloped its way to 500 million copies sold since its publication in 1605.

Written by Miguel de Cervantes, this satirical tale of a delusional knight tilting at windmills is hilarious, tragic, and surprisingly modern. It pokes fun at idealism while also celebrating imagination, a tricky balance Cervantes somehow nailed, even way back then.

Yep, I’ve read it, and found it good but not great. My bad.

6.) A Tale of Two Cities. 200 million copies sold. 

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” and apparently, it was also one of the most read. Set during the French Revolution, A Tale of Two Cities has sold 200 million copies, making it Charles Dickens’ bestselling novel.

Yes, I read it, but think there are better works by Dickens, like Bleak House or David Copperfield.

7.) The Little Prince.  200 million copies sold. 

The Little Prince has sold 200 million copies and remains one of the most translated works ever written. On the surface, it’s a children’s story. Underneath, it’s a poetic meditation on love, loneliness, and what really matters.

It’s the kind of book people reread at different stages of life, and somehow find something new each time.

Yes, I read it—twice, once when younger and once when I was over 40.  I didn’t find much new the second time, and thought it was sappy. Sue me.

8.) The Book of Mormon. 190 million copies sold.

With 190 million copies sold, The Book of Mormon stands as another major religious text with global reach.

Published in 1830, it forms the foundation of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Its distribution has been driven largely by missionary efforts, making it one of the most actively shared books in modern history.

Yep, I read it, again while writing Faith Versus Fact. It’s a straight ripoff of the Bible, confected not by God but by Joseph Smith, who apparently loved the phrase, “And so it came to pass.” The only part worth reading are the two “testimonies” at the beginning, with 11 people swearing that they actually saw the golden plates. They were all lying. Here’s the second testimony (you can see the whole book here).  Given the fraudlent way the book came to be, I always question the credibility of Mormons who think it’s true.

9.) The Lord of the Rings. 155 million copies sold.

One epic fantasy, three volumes, and 155 million copies sold.

J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth saga didn’t just entertain readers; it redefined fantasy as a genre. Elves, hobbits, detailed world-building, invented languages… all roads lead back to The Lord of the Rings.

Of course I’ve read it—who hasn’t?  I watched part of one of the movies, and was not engaged, since I had the scenery and the characters in my mind from reading the book, and the movie didn’t match, though Gollum was good.  The Hobbit is also an essential part of the Tolkien experience. You have to admire Tolkien for creating an entire fantasy world, complete with its own language—all while he was a professor.

10.) The Alchemist. 150 million copies sold.

Rounding out the list is The Alchemist, with 150 million copies sold. It stands as proof that modern books can still join legendary company.

Paulo Coelho’s spiritual fable about following your dreams resonates across cultures and ages. It’s short, simple, and endlessly quotable, a book people gift, recommend, and return to when they’re feeling lost.

This, along with The Little Red Book, is one of the two out of ten that I haven’t read. In fact, I haven’t even heard of it until now, though it was published in 1988, so I looked it up on Wikipedia. Here’s part of what I read:

The Alchemist (Portuguese: O Alquimista) is a novel by Brazilian author Paulo Coelho which was first published in 1988. Originally written in Portuguese, it became a widely translated international bestseller. The story follows Santiago, a shepherd boy, in his journey across North Africa to the Egyptian pyramids after he dreams of finding treasure there. It has since been translated into more than 65 languages and has sold more than 150 million copies worldwide.  In 2009, Paulo Coelho was recognized by the Guinness World Records as the world’s most translated living author.

. . . The book’s main theme is about finding one’s destiny, although according to The New York Times, The Alchemist is “more self-help than literature”. The advice given to Santiago that “when you really want something to happen, the whole universe will conspire so that your wish comes true” is the core of the novel’s thinking. Coelho originally wrote The Alchemist in only two weeks, explaining later that he was able to work at this pace because the story was “already written in [his] soul.”

The NYT take, archived, is here. where Will Smith, who likes the book, calls it “real metaphysical, esoteric nonsense.”  I don’t think I’ll be reading it: life is too short. But if you have read it, weigh in below. The author must be bloody rich!

I’ve recently finished three books, all recommended by my erstwhile editor at Viking Penguin, who knows her books. I enjoyed them all, and I’m reading another book now in preparation for travel (the last below):

We Don’t Know Ourselves:  A Personal History of Ireland Since 1958, published in 2021 Fintan O’Toole. I wouldn’t have thought I’d be engrossed by a history of modern Ireland, but this book did the job. O’Toole, a respected Irish journalist and drama critic, decided to recount the modern history of Ireland from the year he was born up to the time of publication, with each chapter encompassing a period of time.  As I said, I really liked the book and learned a ton, especially about the entangled and convoluted history of the Catholic Church and Irish politics during this period.  Even in O’Toole’s youth and young manhood, the Church was enslaving children and unwed pregnant mothers, engaging in financial misdealings with the government, and oppressing the Irish (condoms were legalized only for married people in 1979, and for the unmarried in 1985; while abortions were illegal until just seven years ago).  That the Irish came through all this shows their resilience.

Empire of the Sun, published in 1984 novel by the English writer J. G. Ballard. This is a “fictionalized biography” based on Ballard’s experiences as a youth in China when he was separated from his parents and interred in a Japanese prison camp near Shanghai for some years.  The resourcefulness of Ballard, insofar as his depiction is true, is amazing, and the book engrossing. I gather that it was turned into a very successful 1987 film with a screenplay by Tom Stoppard and directed by Stephen Spielberg. You can’t do better than that pair. I must see the movie. However, I found I have a bit of a problem with biography turned into fiction, as I get distracted trying to separate truth from imagination.  I should just let that endeavor go, but it somehow interrupts my reading.

Running in the Family by Michael Ondaatje, published in 1982. Ondaatje wrote the Booker-Prize-winning novel The English Patient, while Running in the Family is a somewhat fictionalized memoir of his youth in Sri Lanka and of two subsequent visits he made there as an adult. It seems to be more truthful than the two books above in terms of recounting what happened, and the characters are surely somewhat accurate, though bizarre. It suffers a bit in talking about only the rich, English-associated people of the country, so one doesn’t learn anything about the Sri Lankans (then “Sinhalese”) themselves. But as a portrait of upper-class “colonialist” life in the country it is colorful and absorbing.

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt (1994).  I am visiting Savannah in mid-April with some old friends, and was told to read this book as preparation. It’s another “nonfiction novel,” about which Wikipedia says this:

The book’s plot is based on real-life events that occurred in the 1980s and is classified as non-fiction. Because it reads like a novel (and rearranges the sequence of true events in time), it is sometimes referred to as a “non-fiction novel.”

The characters are unbelievably colorful and eccentric, but they were apparently like that in real life. So far I’ve read about 120 pages and haven’t gotten into the main plot, but already the setting has made me eager to go to a renowned and beautiful city that I’ve never visited.

This of course is also a prompt for readers to let us know what they’ve read lately, and whether they liked it (I get a lot of suggestions from such comments). Your turn.

DNA robots are emerging as tiny programmable machines that could one day deliver drugs, hunt viruses, and build molecular-scale devices. By borrowing ideas from traditional robotics and combining them with DNA folding techniques, scientists are creating structures that can move and act with precision. These robots can be guided using chemical reactions or external signals like light and magnetic fields.

If you thought the current crop of satellite megaconstellations was bad, you’re going to be horribly disappointed by new proposals from both SpaceX and a company called Reflect Orbital. Their combined plans would fundamentally alter the night sky as we know it, and the global astronomical community is sounding the alarm - most notably letters from the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS), the European Southern Observatory (ESO), and the International Astronomical Union (IAU) strongly opposing the plan, which currently sits with America’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for approval.

NASA’s Artemis II mission will be the first time humans have been around the moon in half a century, and its next launch window opens on 1 April

The science suggests that olive oil can help us fight cognitive decline and even Alzheimer’s. Columnist Helen Thomson finds that only works if we choose the right kind

The science suggests that olive oil can help us fight cognitive decline and even Alzheimer’s. Columnist Helen Thomson finds that only works if we choose the right kind

A new shape-shifting material can change both its texture and color in seconds, inspired by the camouflage abilities of octopuses. By precisely controlling how a polymer swells with water, researchers can create detailed, reversible patterns at the nanoscale. The material can even mimic realistic surfaces and dynamically adjust how it reflects light. In the future, AI could allow it to automatically blend into its surroundings.

Scientists have taken lasers beyond light and into the realm of sound, creating a breakthrough “phonon laser” that manipulates tiny vibrations at the quantum level. By dramatically reducing noise in these systems, researchers can now measure motion and forces with unprecedented precision. This advance could unlock new ways to study gravity, probe quantum physics, and even revolutionize navigation with ultra-accurate, satellite-free systems.

Perovskite crystals can dramatically and reversibly change shape when hit with light, a behavior not seen in conventional semiconductors. This effect, called photostriction, can be finely tuned depending on the light’s intensity and color. Researchers say these materials act more like adjustable systems than simple switches. The finding could lead to a new generation of light-powered sensors and devices.

Perovskite crystals can dramatically and reversibly change shape when hit with light, a behavior not seen in conventional semiconductors. This effect, called photostriction, can be finely tuned depending on the light’s intensity and color. Researchers say these materials act more like adjustable systems than simple switches. The finding could lead to a new generation of light-powered sensors and devices.

It's not often that astronomers can observe huge changes in a galaxy's brightness over the course of a few years. Most galaxies change in brightness (and other characteristics) over millions or billions of years. So, when images of the 10-billion-light-year distant galaxy J0218-0036 showed that it dimmed down by a twentieth of its previous brightness in just 20 years, observers were surprised. What could cause it to do that? That's not "normal" for AGN.

The ice giant Uranus is one of the most fascinating objects in the solar system, with its sideways rotation, intricate ring system, and unique family of moons. However, it is also one of the least explored objects in the solar system, owing to its extreme distance from the Sun. With NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft remaining as the only spacecraft to visit Uranus, scientists continue to design and envision mission concepts for returning to explore Uranus and its icy secrets.

Less than two days from now, NASA’s Artemis II mission is scheduled to lift off for its historic 10-day journey around the Moon, marking the first time humans have ventured beyond Low Earth Orbit for the first time since Apollo 17 in 1972, and possibly even set new distance records for traveling beyond Earth. However, Artemis II is only scheduled as a flyby mission and will not be landing humans on the lunar surface, with this endeavor being scheduled for later missions.

Scientists at the University of Waterloo have uncovered a bold new way to explain how the universe began—one that could reshape our understanding of the Big Bang. Instead of relying on patched-together theories, their approach shows that the universe’s explosive early growth may arise naturally from a deeper framework called quantum gravity.